Contentions

Today Robert Serry, the “UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process,” presents his report on Palestinian state-building efforts—“as we approach the September 2011 target for the PA’s institutions to be ready for statehood.” Serry thinks the efforts are “clearly on track.” His next report (my guess: right around September 1) will undoubtedly declare the efforts complete.

Serry’s report is designed to assist the social promotion of the Palestinians in September, through a resolution by a body that lacks the authority to confer statehood on anyone, much less anyone as patently unprepared as the Palestinians. The Palestinians have yet to complete Phase I of the “Performance-Based Roadmap,” which required that they put an end to all incitement, dismantle all terrorist groups and their infrastructure, and produce a constitution. Eight years later, the incitement continues, the premier terrorist group was voted into office in Gaza, and the constitution is unfinished.

Not to put too fine a point on it: if you can’t finish drafting your constitution; if your “president” is in the seventh year of his four-year term; if you have no functioning legislature and cannot hold parliamentary elections; if half your putative state is occupied by terrorists; if your education system is a cesspool of anti-Semitism; if you insist upon dedicating public squares to those who massacred civilians; if your ruling party is corroded by corruption; if you have no free press or independent judiciary; if you cannot implement anything in negotiations that you refuse to conduct in any event; and if you haven’t finished Phase I of the Roadmap . . . well, you might not be ready for a state.